Nothing Like You by Lauren Strasnick Page B

onthe odometer. We didn’t talk much on the drive there, which was fine because I didn’t really feel like talking, and then Paul finally stopped the car on this pretty little residential street somewhere in Hollywood.
     
    “Where are we?”
     
    “Hollywood and Sierra Bonita.”
     
    I looked at him, perplexed.
     
    “It’s haunted,” he said. “Supposedly. I figure we could sit here for a little while, just to see.”
     
    “See what?”
     
    “You know. Maybe if you concentrate really hard, you’ll be able to, like,
feel
your mom. Or something.”
     
    And that’s when I realized that this was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I flung my arms around his neck and instantly wanted to cry but didn’t, I just held on to him, letting him rub my back, and then I sank back in my seat and looked across the sky at the sun, which was setting. He slipped a hand around my neck and turned the car off.
     
    I closed my eyes and I thought about Mom, but no more cloud fantasy. I thought about how she looked when she was still young and pretty, before the cancer had corroded her body. I pictured her healthy and perfect and then I said what I wanted to say to her from inside my head. I said,
I miss you Mom I love you Mom nothing’s the same with you gone.
I told her about Jeff and how sad he’d been these past few months, how the closets were still packed with her clothes and howthe house still really smelled like her. I told her about how Jeff had said even Harry had cried the morning she died. And then I talked about school and about Paul and I told her how guilty I felt
but isn’t he great because he’s brought me here
.
Maybe it’s all worthwhile,
I thought,
because really he’s brought me to you
.
     
    And then I smelled smoke and looked to my left and Paul was smoking a cigarette, his feet kicked up on the dash, his eyes wide open staring out the window. And I said, “Hi. What’re you looking at?” And he just turned and smiled at me and said he wasn’t looking at anything.
     
    “Did you feel something?” he asked. And I said I did and then I grabbed his hands and said thank you a million times over and then I told him about the medium I wanted to see. I told him about the lady in the new-age shop in Topanga and how I wanted to see if her friend could bring me a message from my mother. “Will you come with me?” I asked.
     
    “You really want me there?” he said.
     
    And I said yes, and he said, “I’d be honored.”
     
    And I just knew right then that what we were doing was really okay. That I wasn’t a bad person and that as nice as Saskia seemed, that this thing with me and Paul was bigger than either of us had expected it to be. I thought,
Saskia’s sweet but she’ll have to step aside
. And then Paul started the car. He threw his half-smoked cigarette out the windowand laid into the gas and then we were driving; back down Sunset, all of L.A. going dark in Paul’s shiny rearview mirror.
     
    Everything was really great after that. For twenty-four straight hours I walked around feeling super cheery and together. I went home, had dinner with Jeff, slept through the night, made a whole bunch of photocopies at the library before school the next morning … then managed to cut, paste, and distance myself from Saskia Van Wyck all through World History.
     
    That night, Nils and I read next to each other in The Shack for about an hour or so. We picked at a plate of burnt brownies his mom had made—“reject brownies,” she’d called them—and moved around a whole bunch trying to get comfortable on the futon with our novels.
     
    After that I went back to the house. I crawled into bed. I waited for Paul.
     
    Paul’s visits were, for the most part, unplanned, but had become pretty predictable. Monday nights were always no good because of obligatory family crap and weekends were shit because weekends belonged to Saskia. So Tuesdays and Thursdays were gold, Wednesdays, too, but